The rage thing. 'Not really.'

I'd never known the C of S take so long to reach the point. Normally he'd get there so fast that if you didn't duck you'd get it right between the eyes. Again, this worried me.

'Most of the vori v sakone – the mafiya chiefs – are themselves Russian, though one or two of the Hong Kong triads have moved in, together with a few bold Sicilians, even though the Russian-style syndicates make the Italian and Sicilian operators look like harmless amateurs.' The steel claw glinted as Croder turned to face me again. 'In Moscow, one of the eight most powerful mafiya overlords is in fact a British national.'

Got to the point at last, had taken his bloody time. So there it was: while the PM was proposing and authorizing and implementing the transfer of relatively vast sums from the taxpayer's pocket to the Russian economy to keep Yeltsin in power, one British Moscow-based national was busy undermining the process for his own personal gain; a red rag, yes, I could see that, to a man like the prime minister, whose notorious sense of fair play had so far crippled most of his political ambitions.

'Do we know him?' I asked Croder. The Bureau knows a lot of people, some of them on the run, some of them wanted by the police, a few of them useful to us, since in our trade we see blackmail and threats of exposure as valuable tools.

'We know of him,' Croder said. 'His name is Basil Secker, and he uses the Russian alias of Vasyl Sakkas.'

'He passes for a Muscovite?'

'Yes.'

'Fluent, then?'

'Perfectly.'

This time he waited for more questions. The thing is he was being so bloody slow, and now that I knew the potential target for the mission I was getting impatient, smelling the blood, glimpsing the shadows, hearing the distant footsteps. Not that I was committed yet: Croder had spelled it out clearly enough – he didn't think he had a mission I would accept. And that could well be true.